Open Stack

One of the topics that came up at during the Ironic sessions at the
Rocky PTG was firmware management.

During this discussion, we quickly reached the consensus that we
lacked the ability to discuss and reach a forward direction without:

* An understanding of capabilities and available vendor mechanisms
that can be used to consistently determine and assert desired firmware
to a baremetal node. Ideally, we could find a commonality of two or
more vendor mechanisms that can be abstracted cleanly into high level
actions. Ideally this would boil down to something a simple as
"list_firmware()" and "set_firmware()". Additionally there are surely
some caveats we need to understand, such as if the firmware update
must be done in a particular state, and if a particular prior
condition or next action is required for the particular update.

* An understanding of several use cases where a deployed node may need
to have specific firmware applied. We are presently aware of two
cases. The first being specific firmware is needed to match an
approved operational profile. The second being a desire to perform
ad-hoc changes or have new versions of firmware asserted while a node
has already been deployed.

Naturally any insight that can be shared will help the community to
best model the interaction so we can determine next steps and
ultimately implementation details.

-Julia